This is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and although many of us live near the West Coast of the US, a great amount of people don't know what it is: an island made entirely of trash. With all the pollution in the ocean, and the currents pushing it in all sorts of directions, it has all collided into an unlivable floating slab made of trash.

This image might look like an exaggeration to almost everyone who has visited the beautiful beach sunsets of Hawaii, gone surfing in Jakarta, or dove deep in Costa Rica. In such commonly visited places by tourists, it is obvious that pollution will not be visible on the beaches, however in many other places of the world, this image is a reality due to the ignorance about littering in public.

If the media above wasn't already painfully obvious, here are just a few simple reasons why education and action towards environmentalism is crucial given our current state of Earth.

  1. It’s the only home we have. We want the next generation to grow but with the beautiful Earth we have right now.

  2. It provides us with food, water, and shelter. Many cultures have rituals to thank or honor Mother Nature for providing us with life.

  3. It grounds us. We all need a breath of fresh air once in a while, and in order to keep this, our air must be clean.

The term "carbon emmissions" sounds familiar to a lot of children, because we hear it a lot. Often, we don't actually think about what it means. Carbon emmissions are the release of toxic substances or materials containing the element carbon into the air. This may seem like no big deal if you don't know what carbon is, but it is toxic and ruins the quality of the very air we breathe.

This graph shows how much the concentration, or amount in the air, carbon emmisions have increased. As you can see, the line is moving upward quickly and soon.